Six enrolled on health site on Day 1

Only six people enrolled in health insurance via the Obamacare exchanges on the website’s first day, newly released documents reveal.

“War room notes” released by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee from the morning of Oct. 2, the day after the exchange site opened, show that amid ongoing problems with the site, just six people had completed enrollment as of that morning.

The notes also detail ongoing issues with the website, noting “direct enrollment not working, VA system not connecting and Experian creating confusion with credit check information” on the morning after enrollment began.

The administration was quick to note that nearly 3 million people visited the website on its first day, but it has been slow to release actual completed enrollment information. The White House has said those numbers will be reported monthly, and in congressional hearings this week both Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner declined to give any new enrollment information.

“These appear to be notes, they do not include official enrollment statistics. We will release enrollment statistics on a monthly basis after coordinating information from different sources such as paper, on-line, and call centers, verifying with insurers, and collecting data from states. As the secretary said before Congress, we are focused on providing reliable and accurate information,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said.

Peters said HHS has expected the rate of enrollment to pick up steam later in the process, citing Massachusetts’s health care as an example.

On CNN’s “New Day” on Friday, press secretary Jay Carney also pointed to the health care plan implemented in Massachusetts as an example of enrollment picked up steam.

“In their first month of enrollment, only 123 people enrolled for premium-paying plans in Massachusetts. In the end, they had massive enrollment toward the end of the enrollment period. So we always expected enrollment figures to be low, we were saying that before Oct. 1. Obviously the website problems have made it worse,” Carney said, saying they were working to fix the site to make affordable health insurance available.

The administration has maintained that early numbers are less important than the number of people who have signed up by mid-December, the cutoff to receive benefits on Jan. 1. However, the administration had set a goal of enrolling 500,000 people in October before the exchanges opened.

Peters said as of Oct. 25, 700,000 applications had been submitted to the marketplaces, more than half of which came from the federal marketplace. She also said the site had 20 million visitors. Neither of those numbers reflect actual enrollment, however.